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"Since you are precious and honoured in my sight, and because I love you, I will give people in exchange for you, nations in exchange for your life." (Isaiah 43:4)

I was there, I saw him. He was coming towards me mechanically, impassively, coldly. He suddenly stopped in front of me and waited for me to speak. For a moment, I froze. He was tall, thin, his face oval and his eyes blue, slightly sunken under his eyelids. I had met such people before, but there was something special about him.

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (…) I can do all this through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:8, 13).

Few books about management can be read with as much pleasure as a novel, because few are as pleasantly written. Donald Keough's book[1] falls within this exclusive bracket. It is a book about business management and, strangely, was written for people who want to fail in this field, but do not know how.

He had played the lottery for years, using the same numbers every time. But on the one day that he forgot to buy a ticket, the draw revealed the winning numbers to be exactly his "lucky" numbers.

An experimenter is like a hunter who, instead of waiting quietly for game, tries to make it rise, by beating up the locality where he assumes it is. – Francis Bacon, 17th-century English philosopher

Along with the rising death toll due to coronavirus complications, a usually latent aspect of our fear becomes harder to ignore. Despite the fact that it is the only certainty we all share, realising that our own end is a reality we might need to confront sooner than we had thought leaves many of us fervently searching for consolation.

Things happen anyway, whether good or bad. Why put extra effort into trying to respond positively when certain things happen? Why be grateful?

When confronted with the pandemic, we are anything but equals.

More than ten years ago, I received a book for my birthday. The message inside the gift said: The Bible is the Lord's love letter to humankind. I give you this book with the hope that the reply mankind gave to God will also nourish your soul. Happy birthday! And, indeed, so it was.

If the death of our parents is a blow which makes “the very fabric of life…buckle and cave in,” the ageing of our parents resembles a classroom where we learn to give more than we are used to receiving.

Every experience we live teaches us something about the world and God. These lessons are always perfectible. From the pain of other people, however, we learn the wrong lessons so easily.

Many years ago, while I was still in high school, our Romanian language and literature teacher assigned us the task of writing a framed story, complete with characters and a plot of our choosing.

We love stories, and Hollywood knows how to dramatise them. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that Hollywood is first and foremost an industry driven by ratings and profits. Children are more vulnerable and more likely than adults to pick up identity models from the film world.

Fundamentalist movements, extremist and sectarian religious beliefs, manipulations of the mass of believers, conspiracy theories within religious sects, and other such threats, emphasise the need for critical thinking.